Remote Underwater Manipulation

Using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) equipped with manipulator payloads in Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) tasks has the potential to greatly mitigate the risks faced by EOD operators. Unfortunately, challenges in remote teleoperation of robot assets continues to vex operations and prevent the full realization of the potential of ROVs to reliably and quickly perform such tasks. State-of-the-art systems rely on proprietary and unique control  interfaces, increasing maintenance costs and complicating efforts to train effective operators. The Navy's Maritime Expeditionary Standoff Response (MESR) program has identified the de-coupled and platform specific control paradigms of current platform and manipulator payload systems as a key blocker to achieving effective and reliable deployments of such platforms.  To this end, TRACLabs is proposing the Remote Underwater Manipulation project to enable coupled control of ROV and manipulator payloads within a single, platform agnostic, unified operator interface.  Through this effort, TRACLabs aims to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of performing complex underwater tasks, while simultaneously reducing the size and complexity of legacy topside control stations and the requisite skill and quantity of system operators required. Through projects funded by NASA, DARPA, the U.S. Air Force, and commercial partners, TRACLabs has developed a powerful suite of robot control software, called CRAFTSMAN, that includes 3D object tracking, real-time collision-free trajectory planning, a light-weight hierarchical finite state machine (for automating tasks), custom advanced machine vision integrations, and a method for parameterizing, encoding, and visualizing task descriptions. CRAFTSMAN enables users to create robot-agnostic task descriptions that can be reused across deployments and across robot platforms, which is exactly the kind of flexible technology the Navy's Maritime Expeditionary Standoff Response program desires and needs. The focus of this project will be on extending and further integrating navigation and manipulation strategies in CRAFTSMAN and demonstrating the feasibility of a such a coupled control system in representative simulated ROV tasks.